Draw Breath

As you can see, I posted on Wednesday last week on Chekist's post about civic unionism. This provoked an interesting discussion, both here and on Three Thousand Versts... about what civic Unionism might entail. Anyway, I've been a bit lazy and have left two comments unanswered, one by O'Neill and one by Chekist himself.

I've started out writing a brief reply, but for distinctly Mark Twainian¹ reasons, it turned into a 1500 word comment. Given that I think I raise some interesting, or at least mildly diverting, points, I think that it merits a post to itself. Basically, if you're too lazy/wise to read on, I tackle O'Neill's comment (with whom I agree on a lot) on the subject of trends in social conservatism north and south and I address Checkist's comment both on ethno-nationalist origins and on why a United Ireland used to be justified but isn't now.

Social Conservatism: As I said, I think I agree with pretty much everything O'Neill says in his comment. I am interested, however, in his characterisation of Ireland as socially conservative and in the rest of the UK, or Whitehall at least, as liberal, and in his suggestion that this observation provides good grounds for remaining in the UK.

I think O'Neill is quite right that Ireland (as in, the ROI) is in general more socially conservative than the UK and that Irish political life is also more socially conservative. I also agree that, given my residence in the socially conservative periphery, I’d personally prefer a situation where my neighbours’ more, um, pious urges are constrained by a liberal metropole than one where they are implicitly encouraged by a similarly conservative centre.

This in itself was a bloody good reason why all of Ireland ought not to have left the Union when it did, just as the UK was beginning to develop proper democratic institutions, and social democracy not much later.

One point on this though: the liberal metropole has not done a particularly efficient job at restraining the small-town conservatism of Northern Ireland society. It seems to remain, in Whitehall's eyes, something to be circumvented (say by exporting unhappily pregnant women to GB) than challenged.

Northern Ireland has been surprisingly isolated from the trends of mainstream UK society since partition. Indeed a liberalising trend is arguably far more obvious in the Republic. In fact, you could say that, over time, Ireland has become more British than Northern Ireland, which is to say more post-war European.

In which case, while the secession-within-a-secession delivered things like the NHS for Northern Ireland, it didn’t do the region’s progressives any favours in terms of the ‘British-isation’ of the society. Arguably the rest of Ireland is achieving that feat a little faster.

Perhaps this is for precisely the same reason that Ireland’s liberalisation took so long to begin: anyone with an ounce of liberal sentiment finds it easier to indulge in Ireland’s long-standing tradition of hopping on the boat to London than to listen to their neighbours.

Ethno-Nationalist Origins: I think my difference with Chekist comes down to a reading of what a civic patriotism might mean. He has a soft reading of it: the state ought not be founded along ethno-nationalist lines. I have a hard line: any specific state ought only be supported as a provider of institutions that adhere to social justice, democracy, human rights etc.

Two points: first, Chekist is of course correct that the origins of the ROI lie very much in ethno-nationalism (though in fairness, in terms of some of the high-jinks in Europe at the time Ireland’s ethno-nationalism, while ugly at times, was relatively benign).

But origins are not a good guide to how we ought to act today. It is entirely possible that a society living within a state, in Habermas’s terms,² can uncouple itself from its ethno-nationalist origins and develop a more civic patriotism along the lines of Chekist's, or perhaps even my, definition in the paragraph above. Now, I think we’d both agree that Ireland has a journey to make here. I think however, that Ireland has made a large part of that journey already. The church’s power has collapsed. The country is far more internationally oriented than the UK in ways that are rooted in but not confined to economic modernisation. To turn Fíanna Fáil’s last but one election slogan backwards, there is a lot more to do, but a lot has been done.

I too would not like ‘to see established and successful multi-national states broken up for no greater purpose other than to satisfy tribal nationalism.’ And I’m certainly not arguing for that here. All I am arguing for is that a civic Unionism ought not be afraid of saying that their interests in remaining in the UK rely solely on the UK delivering institutions of justice for the citizenry in a manner that the ROI does not.

My boundary conservatism point is that, if it’s a toss-up (and it’s far from that at this moment), the status quo is probably more palatable than radical change, for the important pragmatic reason that change can lead the rise of the sorts of atavistic nationalism we’re not fans of. A United Ireland that would radicalise a generation of already-marginalised loyalists when it would not deliver greater justice to anyone else is not one I’m interested in.

Boundary Conservatism: Which brings me to my second point: boundary conservatism. How, I wonder, would a civic-minded person have viewed the last century in Ireland? Here’s my tuppenceworth, borne of my rather unusual set of half-formed opinions on the constitutional course of Irish history in the last century.

As I said above, I think that we – the Irish – left the UK at precisely the wrong moment: the country was on the road to proper democratisation, including the subsequent establishment of a welfare state and the social justice that that brought. To swap a nascent welfare democracy for an impoverished rural entity that was in awe of the Church was lunacy, before even taking into account the fact that the process sowed the seeds of mayhem in the North of the island.

It may seem hard to imagine that a UI could be in anyone’s interests in those circumstances, but the dysfunctional turn the Northern Ireland statelet took after its quasi-secession was a disgrace. As a result, a UI might have been justifiable certainly up until Northern Ireland as an entity collapsed on its own contradictions (so to speak). At least under the assumption that the choice was between Unification and the unjust status quo.

Now, the primary problem with a UI would probably have been that, roughly speaking, Protestantism wouldn’t have had an adequate voice in a United Ireland, so would have been subjected to a sort of informal marginalisation. While I think this can be over-stated, given how large a faction Protestants would have made, it has to have been a valid fear.

Despite this, I believe a UI would have been a better option for much of the history of Northern Ireland, simply because Northern Ireland wasn’t delivering even on formal rights to a substantial number of its citizens, never mind its delivering on informal recognitions. Since the UK and its Stormont branch seemed incapable of delivering, the people were rather justified in seeking out somewhere that would. In these terms, Northern Ireland represented a profound injustice for many of its citizens.

The Good Friday Agreement changed this. I think a UI was preferable to the point where Westminster started trying to sort Northern Ireland out. Fair employment legislation and the reform of government were enormously important junctures in the validity of aspirations for a UI (if you see what I mean).

The current institutions complete that process. In essence, I think the Good Friday Agreement, in guaranteeing justice for all the citizenry of Northern Ireland, despite all its flaws, is an excellent argument against a UI. Why rock the boat when justice is being delivered on both sides of the border? What, beyond a stubborn wish to get one up on your adversaries, are good grounds now for a UI? Certainly there are continuously fewer social justice grounds for the move. The wrongs done to Northern Ireland’s Catholics have been redressed to a large extent. Unless the sort of calculation we discussed above goes the Republic of Ireland’s way, a change in sovereignty, rather than attending to their concerns would only act as an attempt to visit the same injustice on a new group as was visited upon Catholics in 1922.

Of course there’s a profound irony in all of this. Depressing though it is, some sort of crisis was obviously required for Westminster to do the right thing by Northern Ireland’s Catholics. It’s a tragedy that the collapse of Stormont and the rise of the IRA was the form that crisis took. But by (belatedly to a disgraceful extent) fixing the problem, Westminster has removed good reasons for a UI and any validity to the ultimate claims of Irish republicans.

That said, we know what happened when they tried to kill Home Rule with kindness...

1: Or rather, this is a misattribution. See Blaise Pascal's 1656 Letter to the Jesuits: "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." (back)

2: As set out by Habermas in many places, including in his 1990 essay 'Citizenship and National Identity,' tacked on to the end of Between Facts and Norms. (back)